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Human Nature Quotations

Quotations about our very own human nature.

Showing 1 through 36 of 87 quotations in this category.

"Seek first to understand and then to be understood. Most people do not listen with the intent to understand: they listen with the intent to reply. They're filtering everything through their own paradigms, reading their autobiography into other people's lives."

-Stephen R. Covey

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."

-Oscar Wilde

"When you're dealing with a hundred [decisions] each morning you reach a point where you become distracted and less creative because you start to get impatient and irritable. You end up turning your back on opportunities simply because you're overloaded and it's too much to handle. And that bad feeling of 'I just can't take it anymore' leads to diminished efficiency, less open-mindedness and flexibility, and less ability to use your uniquely human capacities to their best advantage."

-Dr. Edward Hallowell, ADHD specialist and researcher

"Everyone complains of his lack of memory, but nobody of his want of judgment."

-La Rochefoucauld

"Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be."

-Abraham Lincoln

"Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter."

-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Many women who claim to care about 'inequality' are nonetheless champions when it comes to studiously ignoring the inequalities that favor themselves. What feminists refer to as the 'backlash' is not against women's gaining equality. It is against the fact that a lot of women are getting to have their cake and eat it too: equality when it's convenient, tradition when it's convenient."

-Linney Uston

"Those who make their dress a principal part of themselves, will, in general, become of no more value than their dress."

-William Hazlitt

"Such seems to be the disposition of man, that whatever makes a distinction produces rivalry."

-Dr. Samuel Johnson

"Praise is like sunlight to the human spirit: we cannot flower and grow without it."

-Jess Lair

"Seven blunders of the world that lead to violence: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, politics without principle."

-Mahatma Gandhi

"To endure oneself may be the hardest task in the universe. You cannot hire a wise man or any other intellect to solve it for you. There's no writ of inquest or calling of witness to provide answers. No servant or disciple can dress the wound. You dress it yourself or continue bleeding for all to see."

-Frank Herbert

"Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody."

-Mark Twain

"Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on 'I am not too sure.'"

-H. L. Mencken

"Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another."

-George Orwell

"Society is something in nature that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life, or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god."

-Aristotle

"As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man upon easier terms than I was formerly."

-Dr. Samuel Johnson

"Want evidence of how deeply we've allowed the media to define our beauty? Look in the mirror. How many of you honestly believe in your own essential beauty? Isn't it wrong that we have let the bastards define human beauty for us, instead of encouraging us to look within each other for it?"

-Srini Kumar, unamerican.com

"A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world: everyone you meet is your mirror."

-Ken Keyes Jr.

"Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking."

-Henry Louis Mencken

"It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious."

-Oscar Wilde

"The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken."

-Samuel Johnson

"Many are stubborn in persuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal."

-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"The great masses of the people... will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one."

-Adolph Hitler

"There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group - there is less competition."

-Indira Ghandi

"Rare is the person who can weigh the faults of others without putting his thumb on the scales."

-Byron J. Langenfeld

"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."

-Abraham Lincoln

"I see each person who comes into my life as an opportunity to learn something about human nature, and myself. Each person has a lesson to teach me. I try to learn."

-Holly Archer

"We compound our suffering by victimizing each other."

-Athol Fugard

"A lot of people want to change the world, but only a few people want to change themselves. When it comes to the issue of race in America, we have to do both."

-Senator Bill Bradley

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Laughter is the shortest distance between two people."

-Victor Borge

"Many an opportunity is lost because a man is out looking for four-leaf clovers."

-unknown

"The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong; Nearly anybody will side with you when you are in the right."

-Mark Twain

"The roots of friendship are tested with the strongest wind. Welcome the wind."